That’s the overwhelming conclusion from our latest survey of the Best Schools For Your Housing Buck, which found that the best high-performing public school districts with affordable housing are in Ohio, Minnesota and Wisconsin.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t great schools elsewhere, but in most cases you’ll have to pay up to put your kids in them. New Canaan, Connecticut schools are superlative by any measure and rank 22rd overall among thousands of districts we looked at. But a typical home in New Canaan goes for $1.2 million, according to Zillow, more than seven times the national median home price.

For a sixth of the cost of living in New Canaan, you can move to Delano, Minn., home of this year’s Best Schools For Your Housing Buck.

A small town (pop. 5,541) on the outer reaches of the Minneapolis metropolitan area, Delano is perhaps most famous as the location for the dark 1998 crime thriller, “A Simple Plan.” Like most of the districts that percolated to the top of this year’s rankings, Delano is within the orbit of a major city, but operates an independent school district. At 30 miles west of Minneapolis, Delano is a long commute to downtown, but it is drawing young families with parents who work in the suburbs.

“If you walked through downtown Delano and met young parents and asked them why they moved here, they’d say the school district,” said Matt Schoen, Delano’s superintendent of schools. “Over the years, we’ve established a tradition of academic excellence.”

To rate the school districts, we started with a comprehensive database at SchoolDigger.com, a project of Seattle software engineer Peter Claar. Claar compiles performance on standardized tests that are now required under the No Child Left Behind law and calculates percentile rankings for every school within each state. (We used data from this spring for consistency, although SchoolDigger has since updated many school districts, so current rankings on the site may not exactly match what is here.)

We wanted full-service school districts with reasonably large student bodies, so we restricted our universe to districts that provide kindergarten through 12th grade, and have more than 1,000 students. (That hurt rural states like Vermont, which has a number of high-quality, smaller school districts.)

Then we adjusted the state-level ranks to reflect the fact that every state uses its own standardized tests and there are significant differences in performance among states, as measured by national standardized tests like the National Assessment of Educational Process, SAT and ACT.

Finally, we screened for towns and cities where the median home price, as calculated by Zillow, was less than double the national median ($174,000 when we compiled our data.) When Zillow didn't have a Zillow Home Value Index for a town, we used Zillow data from neighboring towns, median sale price or data from Trulia.

The spreadsheet work was performed by Christopher Denhart, a summer intern at Forbes who is currently a senior studying economics and mathematical statistics at Ohio University in Athens. Denhart came up with a normalization formula that allowed us to compare school districts on a national basis.

This method gave a nearly overwhelming advantage to states like Massachusetts, Minnesota and Ohio, where the average scores on NAEP tests were 14% or more higher than low-scoring Mississippi and the District of Columbia. It also gave the advantage to states with lots of smaller, independently run school districts. These districts can be magnets for attentive parents and their high-achieving kids, although many of the top schools on our national and regional lists have significant low-income enrollment.

With this sort of ranking system, there is simply no way to include large urban school districts on a fair basis. There are excellent schools within the sprawling Houston Independent School District, for example, but no easy way to identify them in a nationwide, district-level survey.

High housing prices on the coasts also gave the edge to the Midwest. We provide regional lists below to highlight districts below that are affordable by more local standards.

Given these caveats, we did find a remarkable collection of school districts that share some striking similarities. Most are in small towns within driving distance of major cities, as noted above. They also tend to have highly involved and dedicated parents. Most have independent foundations to help cover school costs, the type of financial edge that social liberals may decry but which helps put computers in the classrooms and music programs on the schedule without driving property taxes into the stratosphere.

The education foundation in Mequon, Wis., a suburb north of Milwaukee, pumps $250,000 a year into the Mequon-Thiensville School District. “It’s always the three-pronged attack,” said Desmond Means, superintendent of schools. “Great teachers, great students, and excellent parents who are supportive of the schools.”

The lakeside community’s schools are 80% white, but Mequon also buses in 120 students from Milwaukee under a voluntary desegregation plan, Means said. Housing prices are rising fast, however, so it's unlikely Mequon will be on our affordable list next year.

Bedford, N.H., No. 2 on our list, has just gotten started with its foundation. But the school district 50 miles north of Boston has been growing rapidly, partly because of its long reputation for high-performing schools.

“We were a very small town 20 years ago” with 10,000 residents, said Superintendent of Schools Tim Mayes. “Now we’re over 20,000.”

Some of the schools our screen identified are well known within their states for delivering a high-quality education. Kentucky’s Fort Thomas Independent Schools, No. 4 on the regional list for the South, is a 2600-student district just across the Ohio River from Cincinnati that has been racking up top scores in Kentucky for years. With a typical home price of $77,200, according to Zillow, Fort Thomas scores just below the expensive shorefront community of Guilford, Conn. on a national basis, yet houses in Guilford average $345,000.

Just for fun, we also calculated a "Bang for the Buck" index by dividing our quality score into home price to come up with the intersection of price and quality. The winner? Champion Local Schools in Warren, Oh., a small city north of Youngstown which combines high-ranking schools with an almost unbelievable Zillow Home Value Index of $40,300.

Our adjustments severely penalized states like California, New York and Michigan, where there are large urban areas with lots of troubled schools. High participation on SAT and ACT test also tends to push down average scores. So don’t rely on these lists alone to pick a new place to live. Better to pick a state or a region, and go to SchoolDigger to see how the individual school districts rate.

Hover over on the colored regions below to see the best school districts with home prices less than twice the regional median. This measure still gives the advantage to cheaper inland states, but flags school districts that are affordable by regional standards.